A Writer's Notebook (53 page)

I asked him what he felt when he was arrested, whether he was not horribly frightened. “No,” he said, “after all, I knew it was inevitable sooner or later, and when it came, strangely enough I felt relieved. You must remember that I had been leading a terribly strenuous life and I was tired out. I think my first thought was: now I shall be able to rest.”

He was sentenced to death, and while waiting for his execution was imprisoned at Sebastopol. I had heard a story that by his eloquence he had persuaded his jailers to join the revolutionary ranks and allow him to escape; and I asked him if it was true. He laughed. The real story was less romantic. The lieutenant in charge of the guard at the prison was already a revolutionary and was induced by others to effect Savinkov's escape. It was done in the simplest way. The lieutenant went boldly to the cell, ordered Savinkov to be taken out, and telling the prisoner to follow, marched out. The various sentries seeing an officer pass made no comment and presently they found themselves in the street. They went down to the harbour and got into an open boat which had been prepared for them and set sail over the Black Sea. They encountered fearful storms, but in four days reached the coast of Rumania. From there
Savinkov reached France and lived in Paris and on the Riviera till the revolution allowed him to return to Russia.

I said that it must have required enormous courage to plan and commit his assassinations. He shrugged his shoulders. “Not at all, believe me,” he answered. “It is a business like another, one gets accustomed to it.”

Petrograd. Towards evening it can be very beautiful. The canals have a character all their own, and though you may be reminded of Venice or of Amsterdam, it is only to mark the difference. The colours are pale and soft. They have the quality of a pastel, but there is a tenderness in them that painting can seldom reach; you find the dreamy blues, the dying rose, of a sketch by Quentin de Latour, greens and yellows like those in the heart of a rose. They give the same emotion as that which the sensitive soul obtains from the melancholy gaiety of the French music of the eighteenth century. It is a quiet scene, simple and naïve, and it makes a pleasantly incongruous setting for those Russians of unbridled imaginations and wild passions.

My first teacher of Russian was a little man from Odessa covered with hair. He was almost a dwarf. I was then living at Capri and he used to come to my villa among the olive trees in the afternoon and give me a lesson every day. He was not a good teacher; he was shy and abstracted. He was dressed in rusty black and wore a large hat of fantastic shape. He sweated freely. One day he did not come, nor the next day, nor the day after; and on the fourth I set out in search of him. Knowing that he was very poor I had been rash enough to pay for his lessons in advance. I found my way to a narrow white alley in the town and was directed to a room at the top of the house. It was a tiny garret under the roof, baking hot, with nothing in it but a truckle bed, a chair and a table. I found my
Russian sitting on the chair, stark naked, very drunk, with a huge flagon of wine on the table in front of him. When I went in he said to me: “I have written a poem.” And without further ado, unconscious of his hairy nudity, with dramatic gestures, he recited it. It was very long and I didn't understand a word.

Every nation forms for itself a type to which it accords its admiration, and though individuals are rarely found who correspond with it a consideration of it may be instructive and amusing. This type changes with the circumstances of the time. It is an ideal to which writers of fiction seek to give body and substance. The characteristics which they ascribe to this figment of their fancy are those which the nation at a given moment vaguely aspires to, and presently simple men, fascinated by these creatures of fiction, take them as their model and actually transform themselves, so that you may recognise in real life a type which you have seen described in novels. It is a curious thing that writers can create characters which men afterwards make their own. It is said that Balzac's people were truer to the generation after his own than to the generation he described, and no one can have wandered about the earth without encountering persons who had modelled themselves on the characters of Rudyard Kipling. It may be remarked that they show a deplorable taste. The type which seems most to captivate the fancy of the English today is that of the strong silent man. It is difficult to know when first he forced his way into English fiction; it may be that Jane Eyre's Rochester is the first example of him; he has since then been a constant favourite with women writers. He appeals to them, and to women generally, for a double reason; they feel in him the power to protect them for which they yearn, and his strength, submissive to their influence, flatters their innate desire for domination. Since he is more common in fiction and on the stage than in life and it is difficult to describe a man without making him
express himself at length, silence, though part of his definition, is not the characteristic which is most noticeable; in fact he tends to be verbose. But in principle he is taciturn; a man of few words and of a smaller vocabulary; he is very practical, as is shown by the fact that he uses a great many technical terms when speaking to people who cannot be expected to understand them; he is embarrassed in general company and his manners leave much to be desired; but, strangely enough, though awkward in his dealings with his fellow countrymen, he has a singular gift with natives. At a loss in a drawing-room, he is a match for the subtle Oriental. He uses him kindly but firmly, as a good father does his children; he is upright, just and truthful. He is not much of a reader, but such literature as he studies is sound, the Bible, Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius and the Waverley novels. He is not a conversationalist, but when he speaks it is to go straight to the point; his intelligence is good, but a little narrow. He knows that two and two make four, and it has never occurred to him that in some inexplicable way sometimes they make five. He has no patience with art and his philosophical attitude is naïve. He has never had any doubts about the “things that matter”, and indeed part of his strength lies in his never seeing that any question has more sides than one. His character is more excellent than his intellect. He has all the manly virtues and to these he adds a feminine tenderness. But it must not be supposed that he has no faults; it has been suggested that his manners are not always good, and sometimes he is even bearish; how great is the triumph then when he is softened by the grey-eyed English girl who wins his faithful heart! His temper, although under excellent control, is often shocking, and his arteries stand out on his hollow temples while he masters it. His morals vary. Sometimes he is very pure, but sometimes, contrariwise, he has been at one period of his life sadly dissolute. He is stern, perhaps ruthless when occasion demands, but he has a heart of gold. His appearance fits his character. He is tall and dark, very strong, muscular,
lithe and slender. He has hawklike eyes, his curly hair is grizzled, especially on the temples, his chin is square, but his mouth is sensitive. He is a master of men. Such is the strong silent man who bears the white man's burden, the founder of our country's greatness, the Empire-builder, the support and mainstay of our power. He toils ceaselessly in remote and inaccessible places of the world; he guards the Marches of the Empire: you will find him at the Gates of India, in the lonely wastes of the Great Dominion, and in the tropical forests of Darkest Africa. No one can contemplate him without a thrill of pride. He is everywhere that is a long way off. It is that indeed which makes him endurable

Fiction has never enriched the world with a more delightful character than Alyosha Karamazov, and just as he made people happy when they met him he cannot fail to make his readers happy too. He affects one like a June morning in England when the air is sweet with flowers and the birds sing and the salt breeze from the English seas is fresh on the uplands. You feel that it is good to be alive. And you feel it is good to be alive when you are in Alyosha's pleasant company. He has the rarest quality in the world, and the most beautiful, goodness, a native, simple goodness which makes all the gifts of the intellect a little trivial. For Alyosha is not very clever, he is ineffectual in action, and sometimes you must be impatient with him when the rough-and-tumble of the world demands a more decided attitude; he is not a man of action; indeed he is hardly a man at all, he has almost the inhumanity of the divine. His virtues are passive rather than active, he is meek and patient and long-suffering; he never judges others, he does not perhaps understand them, but he has infinite love for them. And that, I suppose, is the passion which fills his soul, a selfless, eager love, a love which makes that of sex horrible, which makes even the love of a mother for her child
of the earth. Dostoievsky, a cruel man, for once was kind, and he made Alyosha as beautiful in body as he was in soul. He is merry like the angels who have never known the pains of earth. Sunshine walks with him. His sweet smile is worth the wit of others. He has a wonderful gift to soothe the troubled heart. His presence to those in pain is like the cool soft hand of someone you love when your brow is hot with fever.